What is Environmental Sustainability?

Here is an infographic I made for educating and engaging our campus community on the topic of sustainability. A huge part of managing sustainability efforts is simply that: educating and engaging people. This is how I'm going about it.

Feel free to use this any way you would like. Knowledge should be open and free.

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An Overview of the Overview Effect

Have you ever seen Earth from space? Yeah, neither have I. But according to the people who have, it can have a profound effect on the way you view our planet and your place on it.

And I don't doubt them, because after watching the video below, I was very moved. As an environmental science teacher, I already have an appreciation for how delicate and unique our planet is, but this video stirred new thoughts and emotions. I can only begin to imagine what it would be like to view Earth from space and the feeling you must get.

But since that will probably never happen for me, I'll have to stick to videos like the one below or images like the one above. They may not have the same impact, but they certainly were able to move me. I hope they move you too.

The Overview Effect is simple: Once you see Earth from space, you will gain a new appreciation and awareness of our home. You will see Earth as a relatively insignificant and delicate ball of life surrounded by the emptiness of a very harsh outer space-with a paper-thin layer of gas protecting us from certain death. All of a sudden, differences among people and political boundaries vanish and you begin to view the human race as a single global society.

The term was coined in 1987 by Frank White, who wrote the book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution.

Enjoy the video.

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What You Need to Know About Biodiversity

Biodiversity is simply the variety of living things-or number of species-in a particular area. It is a contraction of the words "biological" and "diversity". Biodiversity can refer to variation within or between species, but is usually used to refer to the variety of life in an ecosystem.

There are about 5 to 30 million different species on Earth, with about 1.75 million being named, classified, and described. Most of those that have been named, classified, and described are insects, meaning, as the count now stands, terrestrial ecosystems are more biodiverse than ocean ecosystems.

Biodiversity is fundamentally important to the functioning of natural and man-made ecosystems. All species play a role in the services that ecosystems provide. They cycle the matter and forward the energy that all of us depend on.

But biodiversity is taking a hit from human activity. Globally, it is declining at rates estimated to be 100 to 10,000 times faster than natural. The main reason? We are destroying the habitat on which these species depend-we are destroying their homes. Another scary estimate? Up to 50% of well-understood species are threatened with extinction.

Some scientists argue that we are in the middle of the Earth's 6th mass extinction event. Go us.

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8 Ways the World Might End

Did anyone else see the CNN piece on potential doomsday scenarios? If not, here's a summary.

Scientists conducted a two-year study to determine the most likely ways that human civilization will end. Here are eight of those ways:

1) Nuclear War: The odds of this occurring have gone down since the Cold War, but I guess it's still a possible scenario. I still don't think anyone is stupid enough to start a fight where both sides lose. But maybe I'm wrong...

2) Climate Change: Although this will be a huge headache for human civilization due to mass migration, food and water insecurity, and extreme weather, I don't think it will be the end of us.

3) Global Pandemic: Yes, sanitation and medicine have improved dramatically, but population density and increased global connectivity (airplanes) mean diseases will have an easier time spreading.

4) Asteroids: Will the human race come to an end the same way the dinosaurs did 65 million years ago? Who knows. I'll leave this question to the astronomers and cosmologists.

5) Super Volcanoes: This has happened before too... and there is one under our feet in Yellowstone National Park just waiting to blow. The eruption/explosion would kill a lot of people instantly, then the ash would block out the sun and poison the food supply for the rest of us. Yay.

6) Aliens: Or what the scientists in the study refer to as the "unknown unknown." Use your imagination.

7) Artificial Intelligence (AI): I remember hearing Bill Gates at one point saying he thinks computers and robots will be a threat in the future.

8) Bad Global Governance: I think this is the most likely scenario. We are seeing it right now all over the world. Leaders continue to cause problems and/or fail to resolve them.

Good luck to us all.

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Welcome to My Pale Blue Blog!

Hello and welcome to the new blog everyone. For those of you who weren't following me before, I've changed the name of the blog from The Roaming Environmentalist to My Pale Blue Blog. I did this for a few reasons, but mainly because it was time for a change.

So, what's up with the name?

The new blog name is a reference to Pale Blue Dot, a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe. The picture was taken from about 4 billion miles away and shows our planet as a tiny dot in the vastness of space. It was taken at the request of Carl Sagan, an astronomer who then wrote the book Pale Blue Dot. The gist? All of human history has occurred on a speck of dust we know as Earth. It is nothing compared to the rest of the universe, and it is the only place we have to live.

Here is an excerpt from his book:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Given our planet's insignificance, and therefore my own insignificance, and the insignificance of my blog in a universe of millions of blogs, I thought this name was appropriate. It also means I can write about pretty much anything under the sun-which I prefer. As much as I love environmental science and traveling, I like to know a little about everything rather than everything about one-or a few-topics.

I'm going with a new look and feel, but there will still be all of the same past, present, and future content.

I hope you enjoy.

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What is Sustainability?

You’ve probably heard the terms “sustainability” or “sustainable development” by now, but you're not quite sure what they mean. So let's clear things up.

To start off, something is sustainable if the behavior can be continued in perpetuity; i.e. the resources used to keep the behavior going are not exhausted. Therefore, a key ingredient in sustainability is long-term thinking.

Sustainability, or sustainable development, was famously defined by the disbanded Brundtland Commission as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

Many argue this definition is insufficient and overly simplistic – I tend to agree. I think a better definition would be "improving the lives of people around the world and maintaining that way of life indefinitely, by designing economies and other social institutions that are fair and operate within the natural limits of Earth."

As you may have noticed from the previous definitions, there are some major components to sustainability. The one that comes to mind most often is the environmental component. This involves managing renewable and non-renewable natural resources and pollution generation in a way that Earth can cope.

We can break environmental sustainability into three parts:

1. Renewable Resources: the rate of renewable resource harvest (water, trees, etc.) should not exceed the rate of natural regeneration.

2. Non-Renewable Resources: the depletion of non-renewable resources (fossil fuels, certain minerals, etc.) should be accompanied by the comparable development of renewable substitutes.

3. Waste/Pollution: the rate of waste/pollution generation should not exceed Earth's capacity to absorb and disperse it.

In other words, environmental sustainability is the rate of renewable resource harvest, non-renewable resource depletion, and waste/pollution creation that can be continued indefinitely.

There is also an economic component that calls for, among many other things, economies that manage tradable and non-tradable natural resources in the most efficient and responsible way possible. Then there is a social component that focuses on social equity, an important aspect of sustainable societies.

I hope this helps!

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My 5 Travel Tips That You Might Not Like

Before you begin reading my list of travel tips, keep the following in mind:

This list is not about how to get a window seat on the airplane, how to save money, or how to stay safe and healthy. Nor is it about how to keep the family happy, what items you should pack, or how to travel in an environmentally-friendly way (you should be doing that anyway!) - and it certainly isn't about how to accommodate your pet, what books to take, or how to make your travels more comfortable and worry-free.

No, no. Rather, my travel tips are about getting out of your comfort-zone and learning as much as possible about this vast, incredible world we live in.

Without further ado, let's get started.

1) Get a Passport.
I know this sounds obvious, but I know plenty of people who don't have one, either because they never got one to begin with or they let it expire. So don't hesitate - go ASAP. Forget about how much it costs and stop thinking about whether or not you'll actually use it. Just get it.

That way, if and when the urge hits to go somewhere, you can just grab it and go. You won't have to go through the application process, which will certainly delay your trip and maybe even cause you to cancel it altogether.

Oh, and get the one with double pages, in case your first trip turns into an addiction - like it did for me. Then click here to see how "powerful" your passport is.

2) Go to places off the beaten path.
Don't go where everyone else goes, like Paris, Rome, or London. Yeah, they're beautiful, historic, and amazing cities to visit, but they're too easy. You don't learn very much by choosing the easy path.

Go to more "difficult" places where you are unfamiliar with the language, where the locals aren't guaranteed to know your language, and where someone might say to you, "why would you go there???" Go somewhere like Saudi Arabia, Mozambique, or Estonia. Oh, and forget about the tropical and subtropical beach resorts as well.

3) Hoof it like (and with) the locals.
This travel tip goes hand-in-hand with the previous one. Once you get to the more "difficult" place, don't make getting around too easy on yourself either. Rather than going with a tour group to the Great Wall, go into Beijing and find one of buses that can take you there. Rather than taking a cab from point A to point B, take a cab in combination with the metro, a bus, walking, etc.

A good rule of thumb: If the locals aren't doing it, you don't do it. When in Rome...

4) Do at least some homework before you go.
You don't want to go in completely blind. You should be somewhat familiar with the local culture and any risks to help with your overall decision-making while there.

But don't do too much homework. You don't want to set expectations for what it will be like based on what other people have written. We all have different experiences when we go abroad. So when it doesn't turn out the way you expected it to, you'll inevitably get pissed off or disappointed. So see if you can strike a balance with your homework so that you can be efficient and happy on your trip. And remember, always keep an open mind.

5) Get lost.
No, really. Get lost. Ditch the tour group. Have a cab driver drop you off somewhere more remote. Go for a walk without a map. Then find your way back. Learn some words in the local tongue and use them to ask people where you need to go. Not only will you have a potentially awesome story to tell your friends and family when you get back, but you'll also learn some new skills and build confidence in your problem-solving abilities.

Plus, the next time you're lost in a foreign country it won't be as nerve-racking, and you'll be able to keep calm anyone who is with you and might be freaking out.

And don't worry, you'll make it back - unless you become an anomaly.

Well, those are my travel tips for learning the most about this awesome and crazy world we live in.

Good luck out there!

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